Data centers are facilities including computer systems and associated components, such as telecommunication and storage systems. Increasingly, data centers are coupled to the internet to provide a variety of services including storage, computation and electronic delivery. Critical in the use of data centers is the concept of latency, which is a time interval between a request being made of a data center by a requestor and data center's response. In many cases, if the latency of the data center is greater than a given time period, the response is considered to be untimely and may be lost, discarded or ignored.
In the context of data centers which match requestors and providers of services, e.g. video content, merchandise, transactions, etc., latency becomes a major issue in that a requestor, if not responded to within a very short period of time, will seek other online resources. For example, in the context of delivery of video advertisements to a requestor, the latency of a data center can generally be no more than 80-90 milliseconds. This tends to limit the amount of processing that can be done by the data center of the request, which can result in less than optimal performance.
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